


Regret

by TheIcyQueen



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Creepy children being creepy, Gen, Pre-Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-05 01:33:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17315570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheIcyQueen/pseuds/TheIcyQueen
Summary: Ansem had always thought he'd done the boy a kindness by taking him in. Perhaps he had been wrong.





	Regret

When he came to them, it was Ienzo’s silence that troubled the Apprentices most. With his large eyes and gaunt expression, he was already more than slightly unnerving—the child specter of a late-night horror movie rerun, left to lurk in shadowed corners of the library and watch from vantage points none of them could reach, hidden in crevices and listening. It wasn’t right for someone his age to be so quiet, so collected and deliberate in his behavior. Children were supposed to be verbose and obnoxious, ignoring repeated requests to hold their tongues. The wave of ethereal quietude that surrounded him put them on edge.  
  
But such things didn’t concern Lord Ansem. Given what he knew—and there was very little Ansem didn’t know—the boy’s reticence seemed less a fright and more a given. No, what concerned him was what came out of Ienzo’s mouth when he did choose to speak. For someone so hesitant to talk, the boy was dreadfully eloquent, with perfect pronunciation, diction, and syntax. Had he an interest, Ansem reckoned he’d be able to keep scholars decades his senior on their toes. As it turned out, however, Ienzo’s interest in that sort of sport was pitifully slight. Instead, he wielded his words like weapons, carefully honed and sheathed until needed.  
  
Or until he saw some sport in their use.  
  
The first sign something was dreadfully, dreadfully wrong was ushered in by an offhanded comment.  
  
“I mean, c’mon,” Braig was saying, leaning against the railing and speaking as though no one but Dilan could hear him. “Kid shows up on our doorstep, parents turn up dead, no one knows why or how, we just take him in with no questions? And we don’t think that’s just a little suspicious? As if. For all we know, he was the one who did ‘em in. Hardly talks, just watches everyone…somethin’ just isn’t right with that one.”  
  
Dilan let out a mean little snicker—the sort he was wont to laugh whenever Aeleus wasn’t around—and Ansem watched, apprehensive, as Ienzo slowly lifted his eyes from the book laid out in front of him. The child’s gaze never reached the Guards, but simply rested just a line too high for his text. He kept it there, unwavering, whatever that meant. “Do you want to know what happened?” Ienzo asked, startling the barbed smirks from both Guards’ faces. All the while, he stared at that same exact spot, the inflection of his voice never wavering from its dull, flat drone. “I waited one night until they fell asleep. I cut them wide open.”  
  
“Ienzo!” Ansem warned, taken aback, himself.  
  
“I watched them bleed until they couldn’t anymore,” Ienzo continued, heedless of Ansem’s horror, but well aware of the expressions wrought on the faces of the Guards. “They begged, near the end.” And while he kept his line of sight constant, never flitting from the space just above the page of his book, the quirking of his lips was obvious at the muffled footfalls of the Guards abdicating the post. He went to return to his reading, that same slow smile making him look at once like a cherub and a demon.  
  
“Why would you ever say something that horrible?” Ansem asked, once Dilan and Braig had made their exit, brow furrowed in concern and something gnarled much, much deeper in his stomach. Something like revulsion.  
  
Ienzo’s reply was immediate and unexpected, “It’s what they wanted to hear.” He looked up at Ansem, then, those large, knowing eyes on him, “They would’ve said it, anyway.”  
  
Wise though he was, he could find no answer for that. “You know that isn’t what happened to your parents,” he said instead.  
  
“I know,” the boy nodded breezily, as though they were discussing nothing more influential than the weather. “But I wish it was,” he added, almost as an afterthought.  
  
The knot in his gut tightened, and for the briefest moment, Ansem, the ruler of his own world, was seized by a wracking surge of fear. “Never say that again, Ienzo.”  
  
“All right. Sorry.” But there was something woefully cold in his eyes as he said it, and even then Ansem recognized it for what it truly was.  
  
A harbinger of what was to come.  
  
Though it pained him deeply to do so, he put Ienzo into Even’s care, recognizing his intellectual gifts. His own role as ruler left pitifully little time for him to raise the boy himself, much as he wished. Even was cold and harsh and none of the things a surrogate should be, but he was safer still than Xehanort, who was but a boy himself, or the Guards, all of whom excelled at protecting but came at their own price. With Even, he knew, his talents would flourish, he would excel until such a day that—perhaps—he could be considered a worthy successor.  
  
He pretended not to notice the dissent between the two, as though ignoring the issue would resolve it. All the child wanted, it was plain to see, was a caregiver; he needed affection and understanding…warmth. Even could not—or perhaps would not—offer Ienzo any of that. What the scientist gave him were challenges and theories to whet and hone the edges of his mind.  
  
They would realize only too late that sharpening Ienzo’s wits would prove to be the single most regrettable decision to be made in Radiant Garden’s shimmering history.  
  
While displeased, none were surprised when the similarities became apparent: his posture, the way he held his books, the gait of his stride. Whether he wanted it or not, Ienzo was slowly being molded in Even’s likeness. The other Apprentices found that fact at once both irritating and darkly humorous. It did nothing to stem the flow of whispers that followed him through the castle and town. The novelty of the sad little orphan had worn off, eroding into a sick fascination.  
  
Ansem watched, helpless, as the last vestiges of childhood naivety and trust chipped away, revealing a well-practiced mask of apathy. He no longer answered the others’ jeers with carefully chosen quips, but with an eerie silence and low-spoken threats.  
  
But what did he owe them, this child who would never know the person he might’ve been? He would grow up one day, Ansem knew, to fret and ponder his reflection, fingers worrying over each and every feature. Did he have his father’s eyes? Perhaps his mother’s jaw? Or would it only be Even’s influence he would see? With nothing to go off of but hazy memories and genetic markers, there would always be more questions than answers for him. It was his cross to bear, not theirs, and perhaps for that, he deserved to frighten them from time to time.  
  
So for a while, Ansem turned a blind eye to Ienzo’s less savory behaviors, reassuring himself that the boy simply needed time to adjust, to heal, to mourn. How could he have ever known how deeply and drastically he underestimated the child?  
  
He thought nothing of the way Ienzo took to following after Xehanort, thought nothing of Even’s growing aggravation with them, thought nothing of Ienzo’s request for more workspace. He was acclimatizing and he was growing up, and it only made sense that relationships and needs would evolve and decay. If ever there was worry, it was for the shadows that had begun to gather at the prodigy’s feet, the flat affect he wore like a mantle, the vast and unending stores of information he had no humanly business knowing. These fears were assuaged easily enough—Aeleus had taken to tailing Ienzo, valiantly and loyally stepping between the boy and anything that might do him any real harm—and they were forgotten just as freely.  
  
But then the darkness came on like a virus, quick and cruel and cold, voraciously consuming everything in its reach, much too swiftly for any action to be taken.  
  
Before Ansem’s eyes, it hollowed out Ienzo’s chubby cheeks, turning bright eyes steely grey, honing and sharpening the soft roundness of youth to leave him gaunt and angular, a shell of a shell of a child. It stole the child who was never rightly his, leaving in its wake something unspeakable and caustic. Something worse than a monster, more terrifying in scope than the cruelest of fates.  
  
It left him wishing Ienzo would’ve died alongside his parents, all those years ago.

**Author's Note:**

> Reupload from 4/13/14.


End file.
